Designed to be a blank slate, Graphik is a “vanilla-flavored” typeface that is perfectly suited for whatever style of expression is needed. Its purposeful, elegant plainness allows it to move effortlessly between being a central design element or playing a supporting role in a wide range of projects and applications
The inspiration for Graphik came from designer Christian Schwartz’s longstanding interest in the expressive possibilities found in plain typefaces. This stems from his early exposure to Modernist graphic design, particularly posters, from the mid-twentieth century. While many of these designs were dominated by the three iconic sans serifs from Europe: Helvetica, Univers, and Futura, Schwartz was drawn to the “B-list” of sans serifs. The lighter weights of Graphik were influenced by Neuzeit Grotesk, Folio, Recta, and Maxima, while the heavier ones descend from Plak, a wood display typeface, designed by Paul Renner in 1920s.
The low contrast and large x-height give the typeface great versatility. It is suitable for display purposes as well as for text sizes, captions and for such specific tasks as navigation systems and map-making. The typeface is available in weights with corresponding italics, each with five sets of figures.
First drawn as the house style for Schwartzco Inc., it was further developed for Condé Nast Portfolio and later for Wallpaper* and T, the New York Times Style Magazine. Graphik was released as a retail font in 2009. The Cyrillic extension was designed by Ilya Ruderman (CSTM Fonts) in 2015. By the way, this very text is set in Graphik.
The concept of Graphik has been translated to Armenian by Khajag Apelian. The Armenian glyphs, with their reduced x-height and longer descenders, have different vertical proportions from the original Latin, in order for Armenian text to look visually balanced — both on its own and in multilingual applications. Some stroke endings or letter additions, classically considered to be fundamental parts in letters like the Զ, Է and Ջ, were simplified and in some cases entirely removed. A number of contextual alternates help to split the difference between using traditional structures while preventing distracting collisions between letterforms.
Case sensitive forms, standard ligatures, contextual ligatures, proportional lining figures, proportional oldstyle figures, tabular lining figures, tabular oldstyle figures, ordinals, fractions, denominator, numerator, subscript / inferiors, superscript / superiors, three stylistic sets
Afrikaans, Armenian, Catalan, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Finnish, French, Gaelic (Irish), Galician, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Kurdish (lat), Latvian, Lithuanian, Mongolian (lat), Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovene, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Uzbek (lat)